Novell has been pretty much for sale for six months, and now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Novell's Linux business may be bought by VMware. Novell's other assets, which includes Novell Netware, will then be bought by a private-equity backed software company called Attachmate Corp.

*shrugs* I simply don't see Mono gaining traction in the *NIX world because of the lack of native development tools up to the same standard of what Microsoft provides.

Neither do I but MS might want to pull out with their tech to make sure VMware has nothing to work with.

I don't believe Microsoft has any 'evil plan' in store for the OSS world other than producing great products and marketing on those strengths.

I wouldn't describe it as an evil plan but I think the deal with Novell was a strategic move against Red Hat and not the result of a desire to improve interoperability with Linux. They could do that without propping up Novell and if they were serious then they would be have gone to Red Hat first since it is far more commonly used in enterprise.

They underlying motivation was to keep a Linux competitor alive against Red Hat and then have a pet Linux distro in the enterprise to possibly monetize or play with later.